


Log #446

by fade131



Category: B.A.P
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, M/M, i dont know what to tag this with im sorry, their relationship is really more background than stated
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-18 03:44:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4690856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fade131/pseuds/fade131
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the war, someone has to collect the stories of survivors.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Log #446

**Author's Note:**

> Written as a fill for last week's [B.A.P Bingo Challenge](http://bapbingochallenge.tumblr.com/) prompt, Military/War AU. Inspired by the novel World War Z.
> 
> I am ????? sorry hahahaha

**San Francisco, California, USA**

**[From the road, the shattered wreck of the Golden Gate Bridge looms up, blasted apart in an attempt to stop the horde from following refugees fleeing the city. The city is barely visible beyond it through the fog. The house is just off the highway, in a row of nearly identical buildings, all modestly repaired and housing other veterans. Sgt. Jung Daehyun meets me at the door. He is small, almost frail, wearing a baggy BDU jacket over civilian clothes, but the postwar fatigue that has aged so many does not seem to have touched him. He smiles easily, and often, and when he speaks his voice is rough and quiet, lightly accented. His cough is harsh, often interrupting his words. He is shy of my recording equipment at first, but agrees to it, and offers me tea.]**

  I grew up in farm country. My father had this little plane, a crop duster, and that’s what he did for a living. I’d been flying with him since I was five. When the Panic started I was seventeen – I’d been flying jobs for him for years, unlicensed of course. Soon I’d be out of school and I’d take over, that was the plan, he was getting too old for it and I didn’t… show interest in anything else. My brother was at university, up in Washington, studying international business law or something like that.

 

                **_You didn’t want to go to college?_**

 

  That wasn’t – there was somewhere I wanted to go. But I couldn’t. We couldn’t afford it, I couldn’t ask my parents to support me in pursuing—

 

 **[He coughs, clears his throat, shakes his head.]** I was fine with this. Flying was something I loved. But then the Panic came. We didn’t have a television, so it wasn’t that reporter who started it for us, but my parents read the paper religiously. Their only luxury purchase, every Sunday. The spin stories were a lot less obvious there, it was more creeping fear than all-out alarm. My mother devoured it, though. One day I came home from school and she had a stack of papers on the table, weekday rags and tabloids, things she’d never usually buy. All of them were full of stories of outbreaks, of the government’s lies, of the coming menace. She told me their advice was to go north, and I laughed.

 

  My father did not laugh. He read all the stories, listened to my mother’s tales of the news programs she watched in our neighbor’s house over coffee, considered seriously this encroaching threat. Some of my school friends disappeared, then my teachers, then the woman who drove my bus. More and more cars came through town, on their way to the interstate, heading north. Finally my father said, we would go too.

 

  He had planned it out. I would fly the plane with my mother, stop at the little airfield our friend owned in the next state to refuel, then continue on into Washington, to Orcas Island, where my mother’s sister lived. It was well above the snowline, it would be safe enough, and if it wasn’t we could fly on to Vancouver, head up into Canada. He had already told my brother not to try and book a flight home when the term ended, but to head for his aunt’s house. I laughed, right in my father’s face. I told him I would not go. These people running, believing the alarmist media, they were fools. A few little outbreaks was nothing, the blight had not really reached America. This would be over soon, and everyone who had fled north would come trudging back, embarrassed, to their looted houses and their smug neighbors. Did he want that to be us?

 

  He said to me, you will go; you will take your mother to safety. I remember, I looked into his eyes, and I shut my bedroom door in his face. The house was so silent. I packed my things, quickly – changes of clothes, snacks, all the money I had saved up from doing odd jobs, the bracelet my mother had given me…

 

**[He touches his bare wrist, an unconscious gesture, pausing for a moment.]**

 

  I didn’t even leave them a note. I waited until it was late, until I was sure they were asleep. I slipped out my bedroom window and walked all the way into town, and bought a ticket for the earliest bus into the city. I didn’t… I didn’t consider if they would worry, if they would look for me, I only thought that I was right and they were wrong. I would call them in a few days, I thought, after I had done what I meant to do, and they would understand.

 

                **_What you meant to do?_**

 

 **[He smiles humorlessly.]** I waited outside the recruitment office until they opened, and I enlisted with the Air Force. It seems hypocritical, I suppose; I told my parents there was no danger, but here I was signing up to protect the nation. I think it was only ever… bravado. Insisting the blight was a sham, a media circus, it was just… I was young. I didn’t want to believe it. But inside I knew it was true, it was real, the danger was coming. At least I made the right choice there.

 

  In those days the recruiters were already desperate. All I had was my junior operator’s license to drive my mother’s car on the weekends, but they didn’t blink twice at my age or my lack of supervision. If I wanted to join I was in. They shipped me off to base as soon as they could, to get me trained up. Fast track for a good half of it, luckily – I mean, by the time I was out of basic and into real training, they had already begun the retreat. Air Force planes were getting mothballed, all those high-tech deals were worthless now that fueling them was nearly impossible, but I already knew how to fly a prop plane and that was infinitely more valuable.

 

                **_Did you ever call your parents?_**

 

  …I did. About a week, maybe two, after I’d left home.

 

                **[He pauses.]**

 

  There was no answer, of course. None at the neighbors’, either. I didn’t know my aunt’s number. My brother’s cell phone was disconnected. After… I didn’t try again. I know… all the boats out of Seattle, the ones heading for the surrounding islands, they were all overrun. We heard about that, even on the base. Someone smuggled their family into one of the big cruise ships, all infected, they got loose and tore through everyone. Zacks in the water, clawing at the other boats, too many people trying to climb on board, the fires spreading… I can’t imagine it. I hope my brother wasn’t there that day.

 

  I got in touch with our friend at the air field. Later, you understand, officially in order to find another good landing strip to be a refit and refuel base for supply runs. He told me my parents had come through, about a week after I’d run off. He said they looked okay, not hurt, but they hadn’t stayed longer than to refuel. I don’t know if they made it up to Orcas Island, if they escaped further north after that. I remember hearing about that mystery from a few Navy boys, landed on Orcas to see if they could refuel, if anyone wanted to head inland. Not a soul on the whole island. Three towns and no people, no Zack, nothing.

 

                **_The official story was that those people had fled into Canada._**

 

  Of course. It’s plausible. They had plenty of ships. But with no outbreak on the island, I always wondered… why would they go?

 

**[For a moment we are both silent. Daehyun offers me more tea, then puts the kettle back on.]**

 

  I did supply runs, after the retreat was finalized and the Rockies were secure. Actually, at first, a lot of those runs were to resettlement centers on this side of the mountains. We were still working on eradicating the blight, still securing our power base. The people we left behind, they had to wait.

 

                **_But once the West Coast Safe Zone was secured, regular supply runs went out to the remaining outposts. Tools, food, people…_**

 

  People. That was the worst. Someone with a vital skill, go drop them with the garrison guarding this mine here. Half the time you couldn’t land, so it wasn’t just dropping them, it was abandoning them. I remember… every person I had to transport. Grim faces, smiles, it doesn’t matter. A lot of them went to die.

 

                **_The survival rate—_**

 

  I don’t care what it was. Enough of those outposts were overrun. Of course you couldn’t say things like that, when you were still in service. One time I balked, this kid was supposed to drop in Cape Cod – Boston was a White Zone at the time – I don’t even remember what he was going for, but he was younger than me. I couldn’t do it. They put me through psych, enough evaluations to make your head spin. They had me running local resupply for six months, before they felt I was “ready to get back to work.”

 

                **_Which is when they sent you to the Blue Zone in Maryland._**

 

  Yeah. This rich investor had built a landing strip behind her house; she was an amateur pilot. House was big enough for fifty people, really, and they built onto it, she’d walled around the whole thing, turned as much of the surrounding land as they could into a garden. Maybe a hundred people lived in there, this tiny little nothing group really, not even attracting a whole lot of Zack attention.

 

                **_Then why were you sent?_**

 

 **[He laughs.]** They had something we needed. Someone, actually. I think it’s funny, they hid the reason for my mission for so long, after everyone already knew who I’d gone for. Hi— sorry, Doctor Kim, had been on one of the last transatlantic flights. He was coming back from a conference in… I don’t remember where. At the time, he was… he’d just barely graduated med school, he was the first one to study Zack in full detail, the first one to begin to understand even a fraction of what was happening. His plane got diverted into Baltimore right at the end of the Panic, and it’s only dumb luck he made it somewhere safe. The government actually gave up looking for him, but then this little outpost starts asking for an interpreter, their doctor barely speaks any English. That’s why they picked me, because I spoke Korean.

 

  The flight over was fine. I refueled at one of the designated safe zones, dropped some supplies along the way. My bird was light when I reached Maryland, and even though it was a tiny runway I managed the landing. At first they were so happy to see me, I had food and medicine, tools, things they needed. I could tell them what their doctor had been trying to explain in broken English. He was happy to see me, too. He was frustrated, you know? There wasn’t time to learn a new language, there were wounds to treat, illnesses to deal with, there was always work to do.

 

                **[He sighs.]**

 

  They weren’t happy when they realized he was leaving with me.

 

                **_According to the report, you were instructed not to inform anyone of your purpose._**

 

  That’s correct. I didn’t tell them. But I had to tell the doc, the morning of. Make him pack up his things, but not too much, not enough to be suspicious. But… the first person who saw us walk out of the house together raised the alarm. Like we were Zack crawling over their walls, y’know? They all came out to the air strip, yelling and arguing. Doctor Kim tried to tell them it was okay, that was one of the phrases he had down well, but they weren’t listening anymore. They didn’t rush the plane when we got in. I think they were still… in shock, a little. Why would I come all this way, through all this risk, just to take their doctor? Is that really what their government sent me to do? It couldn’t be.

 

  But it was. They chased after the plane, down the runway. Threw things. They caught one of my wings but I figured, it was fine. We were up and away. I just had to be careful.

 

  The doctor, he was a little freaked out. White as a sheet and asking me why. After all he’d lived with those people for a long time now, he’d gotten to know them, to care about them. I had to tell him we needed him more for the war effort. A hundred people in Maryland couldn’t be more important than the future of the whole country, the whole world.

 

                **_Did he understand?_**

 

  Not in that exact moment, no. It didn’t matter though. I… underestimated the damage to the wing. We refueled in Indiana just fine, I looked at it, I thought we were good. We went down over Nebraska. So close, you know? If we could have just…

 

  I got out of there. Two of my crew had already scrambled, the doctor was just snapping on his chute, he said go so I went. No time for hard thought, you know? I never saw the other two chutes. But I saw the doctor jump, saw his chute deploy at the perfect time, tried to watch where he landed and control my own descent. I landed fine, cut my chute, tried to head quietly in the right direction. I made it maybe halfway to where I thought he’d gone down when Zack popped up and grabbed me. Came around the corner of a rock and snagged me, got a good grip on the torn part of my flight jacket and I got turned around, got it around my neck…

 

**[Daehyun rubs at his throat, pushing the collar of his BDU jacket down. There is a thick scar there, white against his tanned skin.]**

 

  I don’t remember, exactly. It comes in flashes, sometimes. Doctor Kim, he came out of the woods, he’d been tracking to find me too. He pulled the thing off me. It didn’t have a working jaw, the whole bottom half of its face was just… gone. But it was trying anyway, and—

 

**[He breaks off, coughing violently. Lt. Yoo Youngjae rushes down the last few stairs and into the kitchen, pouring a glass of water and rubbing Daehyun’s shoulders while he drinks. He has a streak of white in his hair, remnants of Z-shock. There is a bracelet around his wrist, a simple leather strip with a prewar engraved silver charm looped onto it, obviously from an older piece.]**

 

  Sorry about that.

 

                **_It’s quite alright._**

 

  I don’t… remember that part, anyway. The doctor told me about it all after.

 

                **_I have an appointment with him next week. I can have him fill in any details he thinks are important, if you’d prefer._**

 

  Yeah, that’s a good idea.

 

**[He arches his eyebrows at Youngjae until he introduces himself and sits down at the kitchen table with us. The Lieutenant has asked that his remarks not be used for this interview, and agreed to speak with me personally at a later date.]**

  Where was I?

 

                **_After the attack. Official reports state you and Doctor Kim were found at—_**

 

  Tactical Base echo-three-three-nine. Yeah. That’s where I woke up. It’s about… five or six miles from where my plane went down. Maybe two from where our chutes dropped us. I don’t know if you’ve seen Himchan – the doctor, he’s better now, but during the war he was a rail. I’ve got no idea how he got me that far.

 

  The bases that close to the Rockies, they were… the first glimmers of the Battle of Hope in the making, you know? There were five or six of them, spread out – they lured away the nearest infestations of Zack, too, kept the mountain range a little more clear for us. Echo 339 is the only one that didn’t make it. They fell right at the beginning. Structural damage from the earthquake the Three Gorges collapse caused, you know. Zack got in before they even realized what damage the tremors had done. It was eerie, you know? The alarm had come up out of nowhere for them, so they’d just… left things. Like they’d be right back. Not like most civilian houses you see, the liberation footage from the sweep across the country where everything’s been looted, everyone left in a scared rush and took everything they thought they needed. But here…

 

  The good part though was since the place was empty, Zack had already wandered on. There was this building in the middle, up on stilts with a retractable ladder, a lookout tower. That’s where we holed up. The doctor scoured the place for supplies, raided out their medical room and their food storage and their bunkers. I remember waking up to that grey cement ceiling, and just quiet all around us, birds and crickets, and wondering how I wasn’t dead. I…

 

**[He pauses for a long time, staring out the window. The kitchen overlooks the back yard, where a fire pit has been laid in the middle, with a small stack of wood beside it, and three chairs.]**

 

  I was convinced I’d been infected. Tried to tell the doc, he had to kill me, you know? Before I reanimated and got him. He was the mission, after all, I’d come through all this because they needed _him_. I couldn’t be what killed him.

 

  He kept telling me, it didn’t bite you, it didn’t bleed on you. Zack’s gross, but the virus that causes the reanimation kills every living thing in the body. No bacteria, nothing. It’s wrong to call it bleeding, what Zack does when you injure it. That black goo isn’t blood anymore. He was so sure it didn’t get on me, in my injury, but I was so sure he was lying. I didn’t know I’d already been out for a good couple days. Long enough to reanimate already, you know? Even a slow burn, I would have shown symptoms by then. I should have believed him when he said he was sure I was clean.

 

  We couldn’t draw watch at night, I couldn’t… stay awake that long. Himchan, he’d catch an hour or two of sleep during the day, and stay up all night working. He had this little notebook full of all his research on Zack, and he’d write on anything he could find to keep going. There wasn’t a lot of blank paper on the base so he wrote in the margins of a couple books, on a tablecloth from the mess, on the wall when he had to draw something big. That’s when he came up with the formula for the vaccine. Couldn’t do anything to test it, you know, but he wouldn’t stop working. He knew how important it was.

 

  This one day – I was finally feeling like I could get up, move around. He said that was a good sign but I… I was so convinced, you know? When he was sleeping, I went down into the base. Looked around a little. Being someplace like that, where it’s so quiet – just what’s left of nature around you, no other people, no Zack moaning outside the walls… was peaceful. One of the men had left a service revolver on his bed, just lying there next to his jacket, like he’d just pulled them off.

 

  I’m… lucky. Himchan found me before— I heard him in the door and my first thought was it was Zack, what if the doctor came looking for me and got bit? I couldn’t leave it. But it was just…

 

  He said, he just said, it would be a waste.

 

**[There is a long silence. The front door opens quietly with Doctor Kim’s return home, and Youngjae excuses himself to leave us in privacy, following the doctor upstairs. Daehyun clears his throat.]**

 

  It wasn’t really about… any of the things he said. He was _there_.

 

  He brought me back up into the tower but I don’t really remember it. I don’t think I’d… cried like that since I was a kid. I told him everything, my whole life story practically, poured my heart out to him. How I fought with my parents, how I felt like they didn’t care what I wanted, how there was always enough money for my brother to chase his dream but not for me. I wanted to be a singer, before the war. It was just a dream, but…

 

**[He gets up to refill his water glass and offers me more tea. I decline, but he stays standing.]**

 

  After that was different. We were there for about three months, I’m sure you read the report. We almost ran out of supplies, so much had spoiled when the backup generators went down. But finally one of the surveillance blimps picked up my distress beacon. They landed a plane just like mine on the stretch of road leading up to the base. I don’t think either of us believed we were finally getting out. They flew us back into the safe zone, right to port. They were going to leave me at the hospital unit but I wouldn’t… I said I’d stay with the doctor until he got where he was going. It was my mission even if I’d fucked it up. Lt. Yoo was the first officer on the ship that brought us out to Hawaii.

 

                **_Where the doctor began working on the vaccine._**

 

  Yeah. They wanted to send him out to China Lake but he said no. There was a research facility cobbled together on the _Saratoga_ , bunch of scientists and doctors from the UN conference trying to work out – anything, really. He can tell you better.

 

                **_Of course._**

 

  Why are you doing this? I mean, I know for the report, but…

 

                **_Someone should tell these stories. The people shouldn’t forget._**

 

  I get it, just… it’s not like we did anything special. I certainly didn’t.

 

                **_Without you—_**

 

  No, I know, without me Doctor Kim would have languished in that backwater Blue Zone. They fell, did you know that? It’s not in the official report. The doc and I were still stranded in the wilderness when it happened, so I didn’t hear until I went looking. The guys at Radio Free Earth picked up their last broadcast. A group of them had lost it, went through the compound during the night and suffocated all the kids. Can you imagine that? They were saying that God had abandoned them, that their only chance of survival had been stolen from them. They tore down part of the wall and let Zack in, and this girl on the radio, she couldn’t have been more than sixteen, she’s sobbing.

 

**[As he speaks, his voice grows louder, stronger. He is still staring out the window, his eyes far away, hands spread flat on the countertop.]**

 

  ‘We didn’t do anything, we don’t deserve this.’ That’s what she kept saying. Over and over, in between describing – they just let the dead in, watched as Zack ate their comrades until they were consumed themselves. A few tried to defend the place, to push the dead back, but she said they just kept pouring in, you could hear them moaning over her voice, almost drowning her out while she begged for help. And no one – no one could help her. No one would. People like that, we left them behind knowing what would happen. Hoping, but knowing all the same.

 

  Before the transmission cut out, she said, ‘don’t forget me.’ But I don’t know who she was. I don’t know if I met her, saw her, I don’t know her name. Official records don’t know who half the people at that outpost even were.

 

  I guess you’re right. These stories… should be told. Shared. Not just for us, though, not just for future generations to escape our mistakes. So many people are, are nameless now, forgotten, everyone who ever knew or loved them is dead and no one will ever remember their names. But we shouldn’t forget they were here. We lived, we survived, because we left those people behind. We can’t forget that.

 

  I don’t think, I don’t think we can be forgiven for it, either.

 

**[Some remarks contained herein are sensitive and pending review. Sgt. Jung served with honor until the retaking of the Hero City, then accepted discharge when VA Day was declared. For more regarding the referenced vaccine against Solanum, see log #479: Interviews with Doctor Kim Himchan. For more regarding the referenced Lt. Yoo Youngjae, who went on to assist in clearing South America, see log #502. End log #446.]**


End file.
